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<title>Comparison of Matlab, R/S/Splus, Gauss, etc.</title>
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<h1>Comparison of Matlab, R/S/Splus, Gauss,  etc.</h1>

<ul>
<li> <a href="http://www.scientificweb.com/ncrunch/">Comparison of
mathematical programs for data analysis</a>,
Stefan Steinhaus, tech report, 2000.
<br>
This is a very detailed comparison of features and speed of several
interactive scientific programming environments, e.g. Matlab,
Mathematica, Splus.


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<li> <a href="Papers/gauss.econ.review.ps">Econometric
programming environments: Gauss, Ox and S-PLUS</a>,
Francisco Cribari-Neto.
J. of Applied Econometrics, 12(1):77-89, 1997
<br>
Ox can not be used interactively, and has a C-style syntax (it even
requires users to pre-declare variables!). Its only advantage is speed.
S-Plus has tons of features and good documentation, but is slow.
Gauss is somewhere in between.


<p>
<li> <a href="Papers/matlab.econ.review.ps">MATLAB as an econometric
programming environment</a>,
Francisco Cribari-Neto and Mark J. Jensen.
J. of Applied Econometrics, 12(6):735-432, 1997.
<br>
The basic conclusion is that Matlab has excellent graphics and
sparse-matrix facilities, but is slower than Gauss/Ox (especially on
code 
with loops), and has few statistical routines built-in (one must buy the
stats toolbox).



<p>
<li> <a href="Papers/R.econ.review.ps">R: Yet another  econometric
programming environment</a>,
Francisco Cribari-Neto and S. Zarkos.
J. of Applied Econometrics, 14(3):319-329, 1999.
<br>
The basic conclusion is that R is much faster than Splus on
code with loops, but a little bit slower on vectorized code. (Gauss/
Ox is much faster than both; in my experience, R and Matlab have about
the same speed.)
However, R has much better memory management than Splus, and R is free. Otherwise, R/S/Splus
are essentially the same.
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